Beauty - You're doing it wrong

This is for women. You are the ones who need to hear it. I am sick of repeating this so the next time I have to convince a woman of how stunning she is, I shall just give her a link to this post.

Beauty is not only skin deep. It is emergent. What makes you magically beautiful comes from deep inside you.

It's not clothes or shoes or makeup. It's not what a man thinks of you. It isn't based in the opinions of a group of women. Magazines don't know how to really make it or if they did then they'd tell you rather than constantly change the recipe.

It's not less than 60kg. It's not skinny jeans versus maxi dresses. There is no way to find it in the shape of your calf or the line of your neck. There is not a way to dress it, cover it up, hide it, disguise it or have it surgically removed or enhanced.

Beauty is the light that shines from your soul. It is what keeps you smiling when someone stares disapprovingly. It is what keeps you loving even after he doesn't care anymore. It is the secret that only you know. The things you love about yourself when you don't look in a mirror.

If you don't quite know what I mean then look at the opposite... the contradiction. What is ugly? It's not a big nose or a badly cut pair of slacks. It's a person who is nasty and unattractive due to their personality or their actions... and if that is the case then why would you think you aren't beautiful?

Do not go in search of beauty. It is always there.

Officially Old

As my 35th birthday approaches, I wonder what age is "officially old".

It keeps moving as I age but I wonder if I should be looking back and remembering when I was young. Instead, I feel at my peak each year. As if there is so much more ahead of me than behind me.

My mother just turned 63 years old. She is sharp, vibrant, beautiful and brilliant. Nothing is out of her reach. She is writing a book, teaches 5th and 6th grade, tweets and facebooks and wants to go to see Janet Jackson with me in November. She isn't old to me.

Maybe it's 80 or 90 years old but then there is my grandfather who was born in 1900. I met him when he was 96 years old. He died at just over 100. He had all his own teeth. He said it was because he always chewed sugarcane. It's fibrous and cleans even with it natural sweetness. He chewed beetle nut and walked over ten kilometers each day. He walked slow but he walked. He laughed at jokes and smiled at our youthful wit. He wasn't old to me.

Maybe it isn't about an actual age. Maybe it's about your attitude to life.

Recently I met an amazing man who inspired me to see life as wonderful. He taught me to not treat anything as a tragedy, no matter how Shakespearean it seemed. He was my muse, yet he condemned himself to the life he entered via an early contract promised to honour. It was sad to watch. He was my friend and taught me so much but partially through knowing that I never wanted to sacrifice my promise and happiness for an earlier agreement. I never want to be like him.

Life is following your passion. Finding it. Naming it. Living it. Holding it. Pushing it.

Promise me something. Promise me that YOU will be everything you can be. That you will follow the amazing that you are. Hold the hand that takes you home. Live your dream.

Bantang

Today was a mess. Things happened that brought thought. The world turned upside down and then righted itself so fast that it shook a little. Not so much that it knocks you over but enough that it makes you catch your breath.

It is cold here. It is cold everywhere in Australia at the moment. My cold may not be your cold but everyone is wrapped up and in bed tonight.

There was one thing that stood out tonight and it was the realisation that you can put others first but as long as you don't put yourself first, you are robbing everyone of the best you.

No more accepting only what is given. Life is more and I deserve more.

As for those who find me lacking, they can step up or step out because I'm going on without the nay sayers.

Pussyfoot

Some days, I lack the patience to be diplomatic due to tiredness or stresses. Other times, it is due to the person I am speaking with.

Some people say things that show so little understanding of a topic or situation that it would take a huge amount of effort and time to spell out why and justify every reason at every corner.

That is when I get short-tempered and smack them on the nose and say "bad monkey".

I don't have them killed and this should count for something.

Fail

I don't know about the rest of you but I am reminded at least once a week that I am failing as an adult.

There are explicit criticisms about the way I spend my spare time. There are implicit judgements about that fact that I don't have a house or a car or any solid plan for life. Then I'm told that I share too much online. I also don't tell people enough about what I'm trying to achieve in life.

It's starting to get old.

I have done the responsible adult thing. The conformist thing with the marriage and house and husband and friends to have dinner parties with. You all saw how that worked out.

So now, I just want to find stability and happiness in the different parts of my life. Get my savings re-established after 2 years of crippling depression and inconsistent income. Make my brain chemistry function properly on it own, using only the life tools that therapy has taught me and not big pharma solutions. Find a way to trust people again after so much betrayal.

And it comes down to this... whoever wants to judge me can. They can find me lacking. They can disapprove of the way my life is run. They can gather their thoughts and keep them to themselves because I'm frankly sick of it.

Unless you've lived an unblemished life then you have no right to tell me how to live mine. Even then, I'll probably do whatever I damn please anyway.

Like the Lama Guy

Some days I feel all wise and shit. Some days I don't. In the last few days, I've worked out some major 42 stuff and feel a need to share it. This is me sharing.

A few of my good friends are single. They are mid-20s+. They spend a lot of time thinking of whether the last person they dated is their next relationship. They spend a lot of time wondering if they should read this in to that and that in to this.

Lately, I have been reminding them that spending time thinking of these things is a waste of time.

Do you remember the days when we were late teens and early 20s? We lived life planning a future for ourselves and having fun. If we met a person that we fancied, we would think about stuff like if they had time between classes to have coffee or if we'd bump in to them in town on the weekends.

It was not a stressful ponder about if they were "the one"; if the wanted children; if they managed money well.

This is not important when you first meet someone. Focus on if you like them and if they are fun or share interests. Over-thinking the future is not that useful. It interferes with other important things like if the person is rude to the waiter or for some horrible reason wears white dress shoes.

Enjoy life. Like yourself. Don't go looking for too much, too fast. That just sucks the joy out of life.

These boots were made for kicking your...

I have never been the kind of woman who dresses for someone else. My clothes and my style exist for me. They are an expression of what and who I am. They are intrinsically driven.

Other women seem very aware of this. They do not assume that I bought a dress to please some random man in a pub. They do not assume that my heels exist to impress a man driving passed in his compensatory car.

My assumption is the women realise that they inhabit the Earth for more than the aesthetic pleasure of the opposite sex.

Unfortunately, too many men that I somehow end up in conversations with seem to assume that my appearance is to benefit them. In particular, the application of boots.

Let me clear this up now. These boots were made for walking and if you don't remember that then one of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.

You don't have to live with them

I'm a bit of a social butterfly. I have friends, acquaintences, people I air-kiss and other people whose faces are familiar so I smile as I go by.

In the last couple of years, time to myself has become a wonderful recharging break from the noise, excitement and stimulation of people.

When once I was 100% extroverted, some balance has been found. This is a good thing. I will always be a puppy dog who likes meeting new people but being alone and mindful is leveling the scales.

Now for point of this rant.

When you work with a bunch of people, you see them for around 40 hours a week. That is a large amount of your waking hours. I am not going to suggest befriending them all and spending time hanging out with them on weekends but at least be civil.

Too often, geeks can be so antisocial. They avoid work gatherings or sitting around the lunch table. If they do join then they sit silently and stare off in to space or talk at your about their latest technical discovery.

If any social emails go around, they immediately ask to be removed from the list. They aren't too subtle or friendly about it either.

I don't understand this. Some social lubrication makes work a nicer place to be. It seems sometimes as if the whole idea of people is distasteful.

Nothing changes for me. I still love getting up and going to work each day. It must suck to be so negative and uncomfortable around people.

Come on geeks, we don't have to live together. We just have to work together.

Your style is you

People talk about style as though it is something that you can go out and buy. An acquirable commodity that will appear if you follow a recipe in a fashion magazine. An emulation of the hottest star.

Style is none of those things.

Style is the ability to find a look that compliments your character and expresses who you are.

It is a personal thing. A me thing. A comfortable thing.

When you feel at ease in your clothes and don't trip on your shoes, you are there. Just be yourself and dress in what makes you feel good. That is your style.

Your style is you.

Scrum to Scum

It was quite satisfying to finally see that the rest of our population is disgusted with football players in this country. The Sydney Morning Herald published a story about the surveyed attitude of Australians to players from all football codes.

It seems soccer players are seen as the best role models. The most popular answer to which code had better role models was "none of them", which would have been my response.

I can no longer accept the behaviour of these morons and their clubs. They seem to be allowed to get away with the dumbest and sometimes illegal actions, as long as they feel great remorse following it.

That is simply not how decent people behave. We think ahead and consider the consequences to our actions and stop ourselves if it seems plain stupid.

It is not that hard. Do not urinate on shop fronts. Do not gang rape women. Do not let 17 year old fan girls take naked photos of you. Do not act like apes.

There are domesticated animals that behave better than these thugs. We need to clean up these sports and start (at least) toilet training these guys.

Even if they are leaving home at 16 and going to work for these clubs, someone has to take responsibility for teaching them how to become adults. Don't cash up a bunch of kids and tell them that they are gods and then expect much from them.

Australian society isn't impressed. Fix this, Mr Football.

Trust Degraded

One of my New Year's Resolution was to be more open to different kinds of people in the world. To not judge and reject people because they failed to meet a set criteria for those I would associate with.

For the last three months, that attitude has seen an array of characters waltz in and out of my life. It has to be said that I have never made a more stupid of harmful resolution in my entire life.

It was a mistake.

I have been used, abused, fooled, embarrassed, humiliated, hurt and brutally re-educated by the lowest forms of life, crawling this pretty enough planet.

Men have told me all I want to hear and then turned on me. Women have gained my trust, only to betray it so easily.

Wow! What a seedy world there is underneathe that one that I inhabit. There be dragons.

Resolutions are a good idea because they give you a new set of rules by which to try new things and reform your life. They don't always work. It's not often they fail so miserably for me but I guess that happens.

My trust has been degraded but I am learning more about myself and the environment around me. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no. It menas I will be less trusting but that is a good thing. Am I learning? Yes and no. Some of the things I am learning suck though and I wish I didn't have to suffer so much to gain the knowledge. Has this changed me for the better? Yes and no. I see that there is so much bad in the world but the contrast has made me appreciate the good.

For the record, this resolution has stopped dead. There will be no more accepting idiots for who they are and thinking they are deep-down good types. Nope, first impressions. Trust my instincts. Be less bleeding heart and more realistic.

They removed gullible from the dictionary

I over-analyse stuff. I know, it's a shocking revelation but I thought you all should know :o)

On Friday just gone, I was confronted with a lot of anger and abuse. It was odd to interact with someone with so much rage inside their soul. It seems to be what propels some people through life and another one of those things that I will have to accept but never truly understand.

As with most conundrums, I sat and contemplated what makes a person swing in to irate rage. What happened to them to allow the festering anger and ultimate explosion? What broke them so much that hurting themselves and everyone around them is an option?

To me it comes down to something I was told by this person. That I am gullible.

Now, that's not that far from the truth. I do have a tendency to expect only the best in people and then allow them to prove me wrong, if they must. This has resulted in a happy life filled with amazing individuals who I think I have helped be who they are in some small way by accepting them for who they are. The downside is that when someone a lot more cunning and deceitful than I walks in to the room, I go up and pat the cute little sheep ignoring it's big wolf-like fangs.

With age comes wrinkles and with wrinkles come wisdom. Although my approach is the same and the bad dudes do don their woolly exteriors and stalk me, I now know when to see this is happening and get myself out of that situation before anything bad happens.

There are some things about ourselves that we can not change but we can learn to counter their negative effects, if they occur.

I was luckier than a lot of people. I grew up in a world where I was taught to believe that anything is possible. That if I applied myself and followed my dreams, that they would materialise. This has not been disproven yet. A world where failure was a bump in the road and always a learning experience. Situation gave context but never definition to life.

Imagine the opposite. Imagine growing up in the world where you learn that your lot in life is allocated at birth and that nothing is yours unless it is granted by someone else. Imagine seeing yourself as who you are and not who you could be. Imagine failure confirming your worst impressions of yourself. That is a sad world.

When I see someone who is angry and stuck in a rut. I don't pity them or ridicule them. Instead, I try to understand how it must be to walk a day in their shoes. Their angry, tight, unchanging shoes.

I've got this theory

Most of my brilliant or completely insane moments start with the line "I've got this theory..." and this shall be one of them. I will let you judge it.

Some people are so angry.

This is a waste of energy.

If you are going to be angry in the vicinity of me then I am not interested. Life is far to short to waste it on negative thoughts and energy. Be mad for a second and then let it go and move on.

Smile :o)

Suicide is Painless

On this blog, I have explained a lot of the thinking involved in what has been the hellish and amazing journey through and hopefully out of my clinical depression. You will always hear me refer to it as "my depression" because it is completely intrinsic and can be lived through and overcome by just one person, and that is me. Aid is available and mostly welcomed but the final say in all of this is mine. This is a tug-of-war between My Depression and I.

Most battles are won by me, these days. However, the war wages on.

In this life, I am gifted with eternal optimism and unwavering confidence except when the chemicals in my brain decide they will make me feel something else and be someone else. There are people on this planet who may never see all the light and beauty in the world, for even one moment in their life. There are those who constantly doubt their worth, meaning and purpose. Some believe they have none of those things. That saddens me because from as far back as I can recall, I have always felt my life has meaning and that my existence is to add to the collective well-being of those around me. I am NOT only here to add to entropy.

This is a level of confidence that is not based in arrogance. In fact, arrogance is a lack of confidence that manifests as insecurity negated by outward superiority. True confidence is not pushing others down or even seeing people as being in a different sphere to you, but instead it is the ability to know who you are and be ok with whatever that is. That does not mean never growing and thinking you know all there is to know. Those who are "too cool for school" often aren't. Their facade of strength betrays their obvious weakness and self-awareness of their own flaws. Fractures in your character either define you or give you something to work towards fixing. If we were born perfect and all knowing, what fun would that be?

Be careful not to believe everything that those around you portray. In the end, life is a play as ol' Will proclaimed.

Now, on to that self-inflicted certainty.

When the path you walk is straight and narrow, there is no reason to doubt that it will always be so. The yellow bricks will endlessly shine, glisten and call to you to follow. Life is sunshine and frangipanis until the horizon and surely passed it. The best thing about happiness is that you forget that it ever wasn't there. Happiness is heroine for the soul. We seek it. We yearn for it. We will go out in to the world and do anything within our power to obtain it. I, like you, am a happiness junky.

Depressed people on bad days are junkies without a fix but they are so strung out that they can't even go out and mug someone to make the cost of recovery. It's a terrible analogy that I have used before. Depressed people often bitch slap me at the mention of this comparison but if you have truly felt that loss of control that comes with a down day then you will understand how it feels for your brain to control you and tell you what you will be doing. This exhibits as a 100% feeling of whatever your individually selected depressed emotion of choice is to be.

Imagine feeling sad. Of course, you can do that. Sad happens to everyone. Now turn up the sad ten fold and then another ten fold. Your sadness would be 3 on the Richter scale, while a seriously depressed person would be shaking Chile to rubble. This doesn't underestimate the severity of your feelings. Instead, I mean that if a normal people feels a tremor in their life then the magnitude of that in a depressed person's life will roll the Earth and move continents. Having felt both, I can vouch for the irrational and terrifying relativity of the latter.

The feelings may vary from time to time between sadness, loss, loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness and anything else a person can feel. The positive feelings can also be felt in the same way for people who are bi-polar but that is a post for another Sunday.

Whatever I feel when I am down, it is all I feel. Nothing else exists. There is no room for it. When you suffer extreme emotional trauma you can have a very similar reaction to severe physical trauma (a car crash for instance). The pain is enormous and overpowering. Your brain does the only thing it can to help you cope and to give it time to fix you. That often involves shutting down what isn't vital. Like a physical coma, you can experience what I can only describe as an emotional coma. You feel nothing. You are conscious though. You can interact, have all senses and move but your ability to feel emotions is dissociated. You are disconnected from who you are because you are so overwhelmed that you must be shut down to stop the awareness of suffering.

I have experienced this only a few times during my depression and those moments followed huge life stressors - like my ex-husband walking out on me, calling me to him and then telling me the world was a better place without me. This was at a time in my life when I was isolated and alone, without anyone to ground me. Alcohol never helped the situation either.

My blessing in this case is that my depression is referred to as behavioural and not chemical. This disorder was caused by a combination of abuse from my husband, environmental poisons like alcohol and social isolation (an effect of the abuse). These factors compounded to produce my slow degradation in to a severe depressive state. Unlike people who have chemical imbalances that cause their illness, mine is much easier to overcome. I am lucky... relatively.

The point of this whole post is to make people aware that the effect you have directly on the life of a depressed person is much more exaggerated than the same event enacted upon a healthy you. Empathy will never give you an inkling of what the explosive exaggeration of depression on what would be a normal reaction, may actually be.

The consequences are often drastic but not always visible until something awful like an attempt or successful suicide occurs.

Think twice before you ignore, attack, react negatively to or even bump in to a depressed soul. Tread carefully. They are more fragile than you may ever truly know, until it is too late.

People

I don't understand people.

I have spent my whole life trying to work out what they are doing and why they are doing it. Over time, I have learned that the majority of things that I witness and that may affect me are not actually aimed at me. Most people don't mean things personally. It is the rare moment when you meet a truly vindictive person and they deliberately hurt you. That has not happened to me many times and I hope to continue the trend.

With me only working for myself at the moment and not doing the usual 9 to 5 gig at a work place with a manager and people I am forced to call peers, time is a surplus in my life. This is not a complaint in any way. My declarations of semi-retirement are basically true. I may never work a full 12 months in a row ever again in my life if I have a choice. Not because I'm not well enough or don't want to but more because I don't have to. Life is not about money and stuff and working yourself to death for something you do not care so much about. Life is about passion and contentment. Find that inner peace and meaning in the work that you do end up doing and you will find happiness. That is my plan.

Recently, I realised that I no longer yearn for Giles anymore. My heart does not trip and fall when I hear his name or think a thought of him living his life without me. Driving around Darwin triggers wonderful memories of my past with him and I often catch myself smiling and then smile some more. For all the pain he caused me in our last two years together, there were nine plus years where it was wonderful. That is what I choose to remember now.

For all the bad bits that happened to over the past years, I can no longer complain. My life as a whole has been filled with so much love, happiness and success that I guess the Universe had to take a little back. I have given enough now. Time for good things. Time to forget the bad bumps.

I have a best friend. I love him as dearly as I could any person on this planet. He is a very different person to me. We often don't understand what the other is thinking, at all. Not on just a few things but on pretty much everything. We frustrate each other sometimes but always try to understand so it doesn't cause tension. In getting to a point where I see some sense in the way he thinks and am able to articulate my thoughts and reasoning to him, I have discovered many things about the human condition.

He recently made the decision that "it's more important spending time with people that understand you than getting upset with those that don't." And there goes another friend of mine off in to a world without me.

Each day, I try to understand more and more about what makes me the kind of person who people finally walk away from. What makes me not worth the effort? I'm obviously the common denominator but I am unaware of what I am doing.

My current theory is that I think about it all too much. That too much introspection is never a good thing. With this thinking, I have decided to leave my deeply dug hole of analysis and embrace superficiality and spontaneity. At first I thought of sitting down and planning how to do this. Instead, I'm going to live like I blog. I am just going to put it out there and not read it again. Do what is to be done in life and not over think it.

You will see much more writing from me now. More outside and less inside.

Keep up. OK?

Sail Away Sail Away Sail Away

Life moves upwards and onwards as my friend Cathie always suggests it should. Alice tells me not to underestimate the difference I've made in the past year. Candace reminds me often that I am a good person and should stick around. Kellie says that I should be somewhere that I belong. Allison makes it clear that I am never alone as long as she is around.

My mother has always promised to be my tether to this world, no matter how lost I become. My sister's strength means I am safe from the horrors of my past. My father is always there, always.

I spent ten-ish days in Sydney, Melbourne and in-between the two on a road trip to visit a friend's future university campus. Seeing a campus with all the brilliant young minds and their hopeful eyes made me remember how much I knew the world was mine when I was their age. That hasn't been lost. There is still so much to do. Many things to try at and succeed or fail. It's all part of this journey. Turning 34 this year means I'm part way along that path but that comes with benefits of experience, knowledge and strengthening war wounds.

The recent holiday and time spent with friends in two cities that I love gave me a certainty. A knowledge that I will have to leave this safe sanctuary of Darwin and head back sooner or later.

So the plans have begun. I will be in this city for the rest of the dry season and then head off back to a semi-charmed kinda life. Until then, I'm unpacking and selling the stuff that once belonged to Giles and I. I don't need those possessions to own me anymore. He is gone. They will never be "ours" again. Holding on to them means nothing but holding on to the past.

It is time to move on. To sail away in to the sunset and await whatever life brings. Let it be love, work, friends, family and fun. I shall accept no less.

You just start

People keep asking me how you start blogging. It's not a question that I asked anyone when I started. It was a time when everyone was getting online, erecting a pedestal and taking their place on it to rant at the world.

Of course, that produces so much noise that you might as well have your Twitter stream read to you by a speed reader, in Flemish. How the hell do you sift? People stopped writing blogs and found others to follow. Some kept writing. I think they all should have kept writing.

The joy of user generated content is in the search for what you can find out there to learn from; agree with; or fight with. That is the point. People with differing opinions and new ones. If we all accept that there is a certain way to produce content and that hour voice is represented mostly by what is said then we are going to encourage mediocrity and group think.

The Internet is an orchestra. At first everyone is learning and tuning their instruments and if you walk in and hear it, you think "what a mess!" If you hang around a while then you start to hear the music and maybe one day, you'll join in.

How do you start blogging? Just start.

You will find your voice and your audience. Or if you are like me, they will find you.

I can hear them talking in the real world

When I used to hear the word "recovery", I thought of heroin addicts and eating disorders. Rehab is glamorous because if the rich are famous are doing it then it must be cool. In reality, as with all reality, it is hard and takes a long damn time. It is a process of escaping a weight that holds you down. People speak of their demons but until you have met your own, you can not truly understand the horrors that you own mind can create.

I always update you on my recovery and give you a number that represents my position on the positive number line towards better. That number is a percentage. It is a slight guesstimate and is based on a vibe... be it an educated vibe. After all, who knows me better than me?

Now that my friends is a brilliant question that we should all ask ourselves.

Who knows me better than I know myself?

In my case, answering that question last night helped me escape a dark bottomless pit of despair and self-loathing. It is funny that sometimes admitting that we are not as self-aware as we believe ourselves to be can be a freeing idea. A liberation from the punishment of believing that we could have done that better or controlled ourselves in a better way. If we see that some days we are just reactionary lizard brained fools who respond to stimulus then maybe we can forgive ourselves for our mistakes. At best, even learn from them.

There are several people who know me well. I can count them on one hand. Assuming the hand belongs to someone with the normal number of digits who has not been in any chopping accidents. Axioms aside. I spent most of my adult life so far with my ex-husband. He is a smart man and one who knows very well how to push my buttons. Usually, that meant we could cheer each other up or show the required empathy. Not once did I imagine he would turn that all around on me and treat me as he had others who crossed him.

He left. You all know the story. Damana wasn't kind enough or loving enough or self-sacrificing enough so Giles walked out. It happens. People break up all the time. A few of my friends are almost considered professionals at it :o) Thing is, he knew how to push my buttons. Since I moved on and dated other people and learned to enjoy my life, he has popped up now and then to remind me that he still knows me, controls me and ultimately owns me.

Yesterday, he joined Thoughtworks. As you all know, I loved working at Thoughtworks. It was heartbreaking to see them agree to hire the man who terrorised me for the last two years of our marriage and broke me down until I nearly took my own life. I figure for them it is a matter of money and hiring people who can make it for them. He'll do that.

I knew why he chose to work there of all the places in Sydney. He always laughed at Thoughtworkers and called them people-pleasing puppies who could talk technical but had no "real knowledge'. Whatever. I had respect for my colleagues. Why he's joined a group he referred to as a cult now, is something only he can explain.

Last night, I cried. It hurt to the point that I was physically numb due to overwhelming sadness. I played volleyball and then came home and rocked in the fetal position. Then I asked myself "Is this me? Who knows me the best? Dammit! It's me." He may have been able to push down and control the old Damana who thought love was pain and that all the things he told me about myself were true but he can't push this one around.

With that one thought, every bit of numbness and then pain left my soul. He can hurt me. It will pass. I will be stronger and happy again. He will still be him. That is punishment enough.

All in all, I was feeling pretty rubbish for around 4 hours. Then I recovered and I feel more motivated to be me. After all, I'd suck at being anyone else. Accept Angelina Jolie. If I was reborn as her then I'd be awesome. Off topic again. Focus.

Where am I now?

Last time I was 61%. Today, I am a confident and glamorous 69%. Hehehe yes, it's rude but you know me by now and I'm cheeky. Tis my thang :o)

Thanks for all the support. You have been on this journey with me. I hope I have or will help you as much as you have helped me.

Muwah!

How Twilight Saved My Mind

Early last week, the declaration was made that I feel I have reached 60% healing on the way to recovery and victory over the depression that has held on to me for so long. When I hit 50%, I owned it and it just bugged me unlike before that when I was at it's beck and call.

It probably proves my insanity is ripe in that I regularly declare out loud that this depression is my b*tch. It damn well is now and thank goodness for that.

So why the title? How did a teenage love story about sparkling vampires written badly by a mormon 30 something save my mind? Good question. As with most of my answers, you won't see this one coming.

The first thing that goes when you are depressed is your mind. "Well obviously", I hear you proclaim. To be more specific is that your ability to concentrate disappears right near the beginning of your depression. All that consumes your mind is a series of negative thoughts that run through your head so fast that you can't catch them long enough to think your way out of them. It's one good mental kicking after another until you are left too tired to think, sleep or concentrate.

Literature on depression says that it will usually pass within 3-5 years of starting. That is assuming that you are not one of the unlucky ones who suffers life long depression. I still don't know if I'm lucky or not. The progress I am making at least leaves me relaxed in the knowledge that I will be making my own mind up from now on and not some behavioural triggered chemical reaction.

Before I realised I was suffering from any mental illness (ouch! It hurts to use that term on myself but I should own it to own it), it frustrated me to no end that concentrating on anything that required higher level brain function was almost impossible. A workmate (Phil Calcado) once commented on how short an attention span I had when he'd shared a link to a blog post on some topic and he saw me take an entire day to get through reading it. That isn't the normal me by the way.

When my mind was like this and sometimes still is, I don't give up. I persist in reading; doing mind puzzles like crosswords and playing scrabble; writing code outside of work; and painting or being creative in a tangible way. It can take me up to ten times as long to finish a task as I would pre-depression. For me, it was the finishing that made it worth while. That was the point to celebrate and feel triumphant over the fatigue.

My library before the divorce contained many classic books and great works of fiction and non-fiction in every genre you can imagine. It was both my ex-husband and I who loved collecting and reading books. We spent more of our disposable income on books than anything else I can think of, when we were together. Yes, even my shoe collection.

Towards the end of my marriage and the beginning of the depression that almost took me down, I couldn't read anything much at all. My feed reader was always at 1000+ items and the pile of books to read was growing rather than shrinking. That was when I changed tack.

The new feeds I subscribed to were short reads from comics and picture blogs with lolcats to one paragraph updates from comedians and teenage girls circumnavigating the world. Stuff that didn't strain my brain but still allowed me to read. At that time, my book club decided to read the first book of the Twilight series. If you have been living under a rock then it's about a teenage girl in a small American country town who has a chaste relationship with a vegetarian vampire. It's been described as a man falling in love with his food in a New Zealander kind of way :)

The writing is simple and aimed at teenage girls and housewives. Oprah wouldn't touch it on her book club and most book geeks will deny ever having even touched the books. There are four in the series and I read them all. They were a breeze to read and took me around three to four weeks to work my way through them. The achievement I felt at the end of finishing the series was brilliant. I'd managed to absorb the simple plot and get to know the characters without much effort. Yes, they will not win the Pulitzer or Nobel in Literature but they made reading accessible to me.

My ex put them down at any chance he got and made sure I knew he thought them to be for pathetic women with no lives or brain cells. For me, that did not matter. I started them and read them all the way through. Like the lolcats and 140 character tweets that kept me entertained in those days, they also helped me keep my brain in use. That was valuable.

Now, I read a lot more feeds with a lot more words. My books are becoming more complex and challenging intellectually but I keep the fluff around and still roll in it like a dog who has found a dead fruit bat in the tropics.

What matters is not what you read but that you do read. Elitism is a way of excluding people and only makes the insecure feel superior long enough until the self-doubt kicks in and makes them find fault in something else.

Read whatever you want. Play Scrabble or Upwords. Giggle at pictures of badly spelled cakes or comic books with excessive violence. It doesn't matter what does it for you at the time, just keep doing it. Yes, therapy + medication + environment will help you but so will keeping the brain going.

Thank you sparkly vampires and teenage angst. Thank you cheezeburger cats and the Watchmen. Thanks for keeping me ticking. I appreciate you.

Administer oxygen to yourself first, before helping others

Someone once told me that I put too much of my self-value in to what others think of me.

It's so true. I've been judging myself by what people around me say and do in response to me. Constantly seeking their approval by giving them what they need and forgiving every transgression. Always putting myself after them.

Today, that ended. I had two amazing mentors in 2009, Ines and Lindsay. What they taught me is what I am implementing in my life today. Instead of doing everything I can to win the approval of those around me, I am going to aim to be a good person and no longer be controlled by the disapproval of others. Anyone who harshes my mellow is out of my life.

I will no longer bow to the whims of people who I value highly. They wouldn't be asking that of me if they valued me too.

Another person said that you should look after yourself first. I've said that before but I don't mean it the way it is mostly interpreted. What I mean is similar to what they say on a plane, put your oxygen mask on before attending to anyone else. Love and respect yourself before focusing on anyone else. That does not mean you put yourself first and not care for others. That's so not what it means.

Selfish people will take anything and twist it to suit themselves. It is much harder to have ideals and honour them even when it means changing tack and admitting you are wrong. Correcting your mistakes as you travel the road. To stick to your ideals as if they are a hard set of rules is an excuse to tread on heads and hearts and blame your beliefs rather than be true to your beliefs and allowing them to grow.

I was wrong. I will learn from that and move forward.